Pepe Le Pew, potato head, etc. are orthogonal to the cancelling debate. I am not going to defend Tim Pool-tier ideas about cancel culture here. But there are many examples of people losing their jobs or being branded as terrible people based on lies or minimal evidence or even solid evidence for something that is not that bad. I will list a few examples here (all from 2021) with articles from both perspectives

1. Donald G. McNeil, Jr. used to be a science and health reporter for the NY Times. He was a chaperone on a field trip to Peru in 2019 with some private school students. The students asked him questions about politics and he gave neither woke nor conservative answers. He even said the n word once. The NY Times investigated and mildly reprimanded him in September 2019. The allegations were dug up again in 2021 and he was forced to resign. Here is the original call-out from the Daily Beast. Here is a sympathetic opinion piece in WaPo. Here is the first of a four part series from McNeil showing his perspective on the whole thing.

2. In Smith College Oumou Kanoute, a black student, felt she was being racially profiled and doxxed two of the people she thought were racially profiling her. She misidentified one of them and a formal investigation found no evidence of racism. Here is the NY Times article. Here are the responses published by the NY Times.

3. 27-year-old Alexi McCammond was hired as editor-in-chief at Teen Vogue in early March 2021. In 2011, when she was 16 or 17 she made some mean tweets about Asians. The 3 tweets are documented in a recent Instagram post. She formally apologized in 2019 with this tweet. One day after the Instagram post, the Teen Vogue staff posted a statement where they disavowed those tweets from Alexi and seemed to maybe want her replaced. It should be noted that she is only 27 and has gotten criticism for being an outside hire. Also she is in a relationship with a guy in the Biden admin so probably not the best politics editor. Anyway, here is a good summary.

In all these cases, I think an online mob, mostly of liberal and left-wing people, pushed for these people to be cancelled. In the first case, capitalists took advantage of that mob anger to get rid of someone they didn't like. In other cases, it wasn't so convenient for capital. I think this cancelling is done by the right too, but it is a serious social problem within the left. Here is a quote from Ben Studebaker that I think encapsulates how thought-terminating and authoritarian cancel culture is:

Among those who defend cancellation, the argument is that cancellations are “punches up” while old-fashioned blacklisting is “punches down”. If this is right, cancel culture is just the left wing version of blacklisting, and it’s “left-wing” in the sense that it is a way of fighting back against the right’s domination of the culture. On this interpretation, Marcuse would indeed be the father of cancel culture.

But I don’t think this is the right way to understand cancel culture–or Marcuse, for that matter. How does cancel culture work? In Robinson’s case, a number of people saw his joke tweet and began making unwarranted accusations. Because he made a joke about US aid to Israel, they began asserting he was antisemitic. Some number of these people, presumably, contacted The Guardian, telling them that they had an antisemite on their staff and that they should do something about this. At this point The Guardian chose to get rid of Robinson, perhaps because it feared reputational damage or because the decisionmakers wanted Robinson gone anyway and saw this as a convenient pretext.

Who are the people who are making the relevant decisions here? Twitter users–and Guardian readers–are disproportionately college-educated professionals. The people with the pull to really damage the reputation of The Guardian are the wealthy people who run competing media outlets and the wealthy people who donate large sums to the paper. It is not at all clear that the people who do the cancelling are oppressed people, standing up against capitalism. To a large degree, cancelling only works because the capitalists who still own and control platforms and institutions want it to work. Cancelling isn’t the left alternative to blacklisting–it’s just woke blacklisting. By cancelling Robinson for ostensibly being antisemitic–and therefore right-wing–The Guardian eliminates one of its prominent young left-wing voices.

It is especially noteworthy that The Guardian does this in the wake of the defeats of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. With the threat of democratic socialism fading, The Guardian doesn’t need to pander to Berniecrats and Corbynites by hiring on left-wing people. Historically, The Guardian has mainly endorsed left-liberals (including Nick Clegg in 2010). It has never preferred to cater to the left wing of its readership, and it only does so when it is faced with overwhelming commercial incentives. With Joe Biden and Keir Starmer in charge, those incentives have faded. But it would still be a bad look to get rid of a writer like Robinson for purely political reasons. If, however, Robinson can be plausibly cancelled for being right-wing, The Guardian can get away with firing him for being left-wing. In this way, the centrist editorial team at The Guardian can use cancellation as a means to blacklist.